5. John Wayne

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Though his work spanned decades, it was in the '40s and '50s that John Wayne became the face of the whole Western genre, and in 1956 he starred in what the AFI would later call the greatest Western of all time (John Ford's The Searchers). Wayne headlined nearly 150 films over the course of his career, always playing the drawling, iconic hardass that was essentially himself. That persona was so ingrained in American culture, and so visible to the rest of the world, that he became symbolic of the entire country, whether he was meeting with Emperor Hirohito or trying to out-drink Khrushchev.